Hundreds of young singers from the Wilmington area and beyond will be featured in a wide-ranging program next week.
Around 150 of the more than 750 youth in the Wilmington Children’s Chorus perform a pair of concerts on May 9 and 10. Kimberly Doucette is the chorus’s artistic director.
“It's an opportunity for us to feature our singers, their ages 5 all the way up to 18, sharing beautiful music that expresses love, hope, joy, sorrow, all of the gamut of human emotions, which is why we call it ‘Sing out my Soul,’” she says.
The concert will showcase a wide variety of musical genres sung in a half-dozen languages - French, German, Italian, Latin, and Zulu. Doucette says the goal is about teaching more than music to the young singers.
“We're presenting a piece from South Africa as well with our tenor/bass choir," Doucette says. "So they've learned a little bit about the history of apartheid and how that kind of relates to the civil rights movement here in the United States and similarities there and the depth of that experience.”
The concert will also feature a work written for the chorus by Newark composer Jonathan Whitney, telling the story of a Black family living near Cooch’s Bridge over many generations.
Both performances are at the Episcopal Church of Saints Andrew and Matthew in Wilmington. They are May 9 at 7:30 and May 10 at 3:00.
Delaware Public Media's arts coverage is made possible, in part, by support from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.
